Friday, November 8, 2013

Another dip into obscure/forgotten characters, this one is Chintai, a mid-level bad guy character from the NES version of Double Dragon. Hespecializes in Kung Fu and throwing you into the air when you try to ground attack him. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to play around with the watercolor tools in Manga Studio 5, as I had mainly been using the oil paint tools up to this point.

And just in case it wasn't clear from previous posts, I kind of love manga-style line-based motion blur.

Monday, November 4, 2013

Lately, I've taken to drawing obscure video game characters from the 80's and early 90s because why not? I like to call it Fan Art for Forgotten Characters. This character is Aska, a female ninja from the 1993 fighting game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters aka TMNT: Mutant Warriors. Aska is an original character made specifically for the game because ... I guess Konami felt like the game needed a Japanese character?

As fighting games go, it's pretty good though it probably appeared a little too late in the 90s fighting game boom. One thing that always puts a smile on my face is that Shredder has a special move that sounds like he's yelling, "More Pushups!"

Thursday, October 24, 2013

I've been longingly looking at standing desks for a couple of years now, especially since reading a number of articles/blog posts over recent years reporting that sitting is the new silent killer. I don't know about all that, but working on my last project, I could feel the energy draining out of my body as I sat for hours at my desk fighting the desire to doze off. So I looked at a standing desk as a possible solution for maintaining my focus and energy level (or at least not having them drop off so precipitously).

A reservation I have going into this is that just about all desk transition anecdotes that I've found have been for people who do pretty conventional office work - writing, web research, answering phones, etc. It's been difficult to find examples of artists who've made the switch and their impressions. Animation, in particular, is incredibly time consuming and my worry is that I'll be trading off sitting's sedative effects for fatigue and constant foot/leg pain. So with that in mind, I'm not about to spend $500 on a proper standing desk. Rather, I set out to find the least expensive path to converting my current desk to a standing one, just to try it out and potentially knock it all down if it doesn't work out. And y'know what? Cinder blocks are pretty cheap. For about $10, I now have a standing desk

The pants are there to keep the cinder block debris off the carpet.

cinder blocks x 6 = about $10.

I'm average-sized for a Filipino guy, meaning that I'm short for an American guy. The cinder blocks raise the desk by 12", which raises the keyboard shelf to about 38" off the ground, which is just about perfect for me.

Standing at it for the first hour, I was like, "Man, this is nice. I dunno about all that 'leg pain' stuff those internet wussies were complaining about'

After about two hours, I was like, "I feel like my ankles are going to collapse into my heels"

So I went out and bought this 29" bar stool from Target for about $27. The cushioning is a nice touch, but the compression actually makes the stool's height closer to 26". That matters.

Drawing while standing feels ... different. I can't say that it's that much more uncomfortable than sitting but I haven't done much more than a few sketches. Foot pain is a real problem, though - my heels really hurt, and I expect that to be the case until my legs become accustomed to bearing my weight for extended periods of time. I hope my legs become accustomed to bearing my weight for extended periods of time.

Lastly, here's a sketch of me drawing while standing, which was drawn while standing.

Friday, October 4, 2013

I've just made my De Anza College student film, The Turtle and the Monkey available to watch on vimeo and Youtube.

I figured that it's probably time, after about a year of trying to get into all of the free festivals and a few of the paid ones. I wasn't as successful as I had hoped, but you take your lumps, learn from them, and move on. If I could do it over, I'd probably make the film considerably shorter.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

I was looking through a folder of warmup sketches and found some stuff that I might not have been feeling at the time, but I think look kind of groovy now. First off, some sports themed sketches.

Continuing from yesterday's post, here are a couple more Sacramento Kings ... fan sketches, I guess, from earlier this year. I don't know why I find Isaiah Thomas to be a good subject for practice with distorted perspectives. The second drawing is of sharpshooter Predrag 'Peja' Stojakovic from the glory years of the early 2000's. I was probably humming John Tesh's 'NBA on NBC' theme as I was drawing it.

And this sketch is my attempt at drawing boxer Nonito 'Filipino Flash' Donaire in the style of Masanori Morita's 'Rokudenashi Blues' manga. As a teenager, I admired the hell out of Morita, especially how kinetic his fight scenes were, using lines to convey motion blur. But as far as likenesses go, this doesn't look at all like Donaire.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

About a year ago, I worked on a music video for indie hip-hop icon, Murs, and his Yumiko, Curse of the Merch Girl graphic novel project which he co-created with Josh Blaylock. I've been a fan of Murs since picking up his album, "The End of the Beginning" back in 2003, so I was honored to get to work on this. We actually wrapped just before Comic-Con 2012, after which it seemed to vanish off the face of the earth. To my relief, it finally surfaced online a year later, in conjunction with the digital release of the Merch Girl graphic novel.

I worked on this project as the lead storyboard artist and lead animator. I happened into the lead animator position by virtue of being the only one on the crew without anything else going on his life; the rest of the animation team was mostly made up of students from Cogswell College and San Jose State. Our crew on this project was actually pretty big - apparently too big to completely fit into the youtube video description. For the lead animator position, I'm simply credited as "Leo" because that's where the cutoff point happened to be, meaning that the other animators aren't credited at all.